Accent
'Fool for Love' shows playwright was no dimwit
By Kathleen Allen
Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 01.08.2010
Playwright Sam Shepard was a fool for love back in the early 1980s, when he left his wife after he fell in love with actress Jessica Lange.
Happily, his emotional turmoil resulted in one of Shepard's best-known plays, 'Fool for Love,' which Beowulf Alley Theatre will open next weekend.
Dan Higgins, left, Daved Wilkins, Jessica Risco and Eric Smith
in Beowulf Alley Theatre's production of "Fool for Love."
Creatista / Scott Griessel Photo
The deliciously wordy play is about the love-hate relationship between May and Eddie, on-again, off-again lovers stuck together in a run-down motel.
The play is a story of being embraced and abandoned, of passion and repulsion, power and powerlessness.
Shepard, who first staged this show in San Francisco, is a master at reinventing the American West.
'We watch a pair of figurative gunslingers fight to the finish — not with bullets but with piercing words that give ballast to the weight of a nation's buried dreams,' The New York Times said of the 1983 New York City production.
May and Eddie are from Wyoming, but she suspects Eddie of cheating on her and has escaped to the run-down joint near the Mojave Desert. Eddie finds her there with the intention of bringing her home.
It is this 'gunslinger' relationship that gives 'Fool for Love' its intensity and, in a way, its tragedy.
Don't expect to leave the theater feeling everything is nice and tidy.
'I think it's a cheap trick to resolve things,' Shepard once told an interviewer.
'It's totally a complete lie to make resolutions. I've always felt that, particularly in the theater when everything is tied up at the end with a neat little ribbon and you're delivered this package. It's almost as though — Why go through all that if you're just going to tie it all up at the end?'
But do expect to have a theatrical experience that'll stick with you.
'His works often play more feverishly in the mind after they're over than they do while they're before us in the theater,' said that New York Times review of 'Fool for Love.'
'But that's the way he is, and who would or could change him? Like the visionary pioneers who once ruled the open geography of the West, Mr. Shepard rules his vast imaginative frontier by making his own, ironclad laws.'
Contact reporter Kathleen Allen at kallen@azstarnet.com or 573-4128."
